Quotes About Knaves

Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?

Come, brave Diderot, intrepid d'Alembert, ally yourselves; . . . overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves, destroy the insipid declamations, the miserable sophistries, the lying history, . . . the absurdities without number; do not let those who have sense be subjected to those who have none; and the generation which is being born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.

I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.

There will be nothing you may not aspire to; you will go everywhere, and you will find out what the world is — an assemblage of fools and knaves.

Wickedness may prosper for awhile, but in the long run, he that sets all the knaves at work will pay them.

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

He that has no fools, knaves nor beggars in his family was begot by a flash of lightning.